Timings using SSD

If you're an ASP.NET developer like myself, you don't want to waste time fiddling with your thumbs while you wait for your compiler to finish its work. We're always on the lookout for things that can help us speed up our work, to give us those extra seconds of performance boost.  And one thing that's been a challenge to us is the fact that our processors may be really fast but the bottleneck kicks in when we are working on a huge project with thousands of files. For additional insight on this, see Scott Guthrie's blog entry ( http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/01/tip-trick-hard-drive-speed-and-visual-studio-performance.aspx )

This is where I thought I would be assisted by that new kid on the block: Solid State Drive. 

Getting dizzy using the Spec Explorer Modelling Guidance

While creating a sample Spec Explorer application, you have this feeling of being lost. The thing is if you follow the steps of the Modeling Guidance (using the "Author a model from scratch" option), you'll soon get lost since the steps and the sample code are not consistent and continuous.

Spec Explorer - Visual Studio Encountered An Exception

While I was playing around with Spec Explorer and I hit this error:

After this, very simple IDE operations like Copy/Paste are not working. I have to restart Visual Studio 20101 Beta 2. It's getting a little bit frustrating.

And the thing is, once the above error was encountered you have to close Visual Studio 2010 using the Task Manager since closing it using it's own window is of no use since you'll keep on seeing this again and again:

Missing "ADO.NET Entity Data Model" Template in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Ultimate Edition

When I installed the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 Ultimate edition, I wanted to know how the ADO.NET Entity Data Model can make me forget my good experience with LINQ To SQL. Unfortunately after much searching, I can't seem to find a way to add it to my project, whether it's a web project or a windows application I'm working on.

defun

I used to think it's quite strange how this LISP keyword sounds like. I still do. Does this mean to "remove the fun out of" programming? :-)

"Control cannot be created because Visual Studio cannot find the control’s type in the control assembly"

I just got a new machine, an Acer laptop with enough bells and whistles to make a developer happy (Core 2 Duo, 2GHZ, 2 GB RAM). As usual I test drive it on a Web Application Project I was working on in VS 2005. The source files came from an old laptop of mine. The new laptop has been painstakingly updated with all the required patches, and Service Packs, both for the OS (SP2 for WinXP) and the VS 2005 (SP1). I even installed the .NET Framework in sequence (1.1 and its SP, 2.0 and its SP; no .NET Framework 3 though; I have no need for it yet).

Intercepting Calls to Functions of a Typed Dataset

One of the things that we need to implement when doing any web project, whether in classic ASP or in ASP.NET, is how to log the calls to the database portion of our application. This is necessary so that we will be able to monitor the SQL statements that our application is executing at run time. This helps in easing up a lot of problems when troubleshooting production code.